Short abstract

Entrepreneurial climate anxiety — the entanglement of ecological concern, self-preservation, and declining trust in collective politics — drives tech-literate actors toward climate solutionism. How might this detract from collective action and whose anxiety gets to shape the future?

Long abstract

As faith in institutional climate governance falters, a diffuse but distinctive group has emerged: tech-literate entrepreneurs developing blockchain and AI-based responses to climate change — from tokenised conservation projects in the Brazilian Amazon to community resilience initiatives in rural Europe. Drawing on research conducted with interlocutors across this ecosystem as well as the last five UN climate change conferences, this paper examines the affective configuration that animates the entrepreneurial drive for, and various forms of, tech solutionism: an entanglement of ecological concern, anticipatory self-preservation, and declining trust in collective politics that generates a powerful drive to act unilaterally.

I argue that this entrepreneurial climate anxiety is a productive force that channels climate feeling into market-making, technical solutionism and futurework, in ways that may make collective political engagement less likely. It concentrates the capacity to imagine and enact futures among those with the capital and technical literacy to do so. Furthermore, it can generate a demand on communities recruited as project beneficiaries to perform an idealised version of a synergistic relationship between nature and humans which can sit in tension with those communities' own aspirations for development and self-determination. The paper asks what this constellation reveals about whose anxiety gets to shape the future.